A Political and Ecological Aesthetic in Architecture

10 June 2019, 12:30
- 14:00

My research examines how we might think about a political and ecological aesthetic in architecture, not as a greenwash or as the activity of star-architects. Without separating an aesthetics of appearance from practical concern, I examine how architecture might ask us to recognize our feeling in response to the problems of climate change. This is an aesthetics of feeling as criticisms of the contemporary conditions of life: one challenging our usual understanding of bodily selves in the natural environment. Sustainable development asks us to protect the ability of future generations to meet their own needs but the question the child must also ask is ‘How can I live?’ And ‘Can you teach me how to live?’ In this project I will examine the contemporary architects’ political and ecological response. The research will be published as a monograph entitled: A Political and Ecological Aesthetics in Architecture.

Dr Andrea Wheeler is a Visiting Fellow at CRASSH in Easter Term 2019.

Andrea S Wheeler is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Iowa State University, Department of Architecture and a member of a team of interdisciplinary design instructors teaching on the Masters of Design of Sustainable Environment. She has been a UK Energy Research Council and Economic and Social Sciences Research Council Interdisciplinary Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham (2007-2010), and a Research Fellow in the Sustainable Behaviours Unit, Defra, Westminster, London (2010). More recently she was awarded a Sir Edmund Happold Senior Research Fellowship to study at the University of Bath, Department of Architecture and Engineering (2013), and a Big XII Fellow at The University of Austin at Texas (2014). She completed her PhD in 2005 on the work of Luce Irigaray and has continued to attend conferences and seminars organized by the philosopher on her recent works. Her current project develops the interdisciplinary character of her research and teaching to examine a political and ecological aesthetic in architecture.